


Dreaming While Underwater

by roulesamsa



Category: Original Work
Genre: Alternate Universe - 2000s, F/F, F/M, M/M, Time Travel, alternate universe: the french are real
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2021-02-27
Updated: 2021-02-27
Packaged: 2021-03-19 03:34:04
Rating: Mature
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,375
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/29744349
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/roulesamsa/pseuds/roulesamsa
Summary: A woman wakes up in an unfamiliar city, after a mysterious event sends her back into the past.
Relationships: Original Female Character/Original Female Character, Original Female Character/Original Male Character, Original Male Character/Original Male Character
Kudos: 2





	Dreaming While Underwater

On a bright, sunny day, a woman (...what is her name again?) wakes up with a jolt to a truck horn.

Her head pulses with pain while her ears ring, the world in front of her eyes swimming and warping. Even the parts of it she can see are familiar yet unfamiliar, blue skies and cool grass against her head, buildings jutting up above her. It could be anywhere back home. It could be nowhere back home.

How did she even get here? Her mind is foggy, all she can remember is crawling into her dorm bed, the springs pushing up against her spine after another exhausting Zoom lecture, then absolutely nothing. Maybe she ended up sleepwalking here? Even then, she hopes that someone would’ve stopped her before she fell asleep in the middle of a park, for fucks sake.

The woman wonders if there are bug bites all over her body now.

There’s the distinct taste of copper in her mouth, and she turns her head to spit it out onto the ground. Her body heaves, and she spits out more, blood mixing with bile. She’s too out of it to notice or care.

There’s a noise, a sudden rustling off to the side. Her eyes flick over, and she sees the warped figure of a child, or someone very short. Their face is muddled, twisting and churning if it was made of violent water. The woman hears their high voice, calling out to someone, their mother, their father.

It’s in French, she notes. Her French is rusty, she stopped studying seriously years ago and just does it whenever she feels like it. It confuses her, not the French being spoken, she could understand it fine, but people speaking French. Isn’t she in Philadelphia? Maybe she sleep-walked to Rittenhouse and slammed her head against the fountain and scared the shit out of some French guy’s child.

She laughs softly. Only someone like her could pull that off.

There’s a shout, then someone is wrapping their arms around her waist and pulls her up. Her head lolls to the side, and she feels blood and drool drip from her mouth. If she was lucid, she would be horrified at how disgusting she’s being.

There are two voices now, and the woman tries to concentrate on what they’re saying.

“We should… a hospital,” one of them says, a woman, the child’s mother she thinks. “She… bad… very sick.”

“No, what if someone…” The person carrying her says, probably the father, their voice nervous and high. “We don’t know… what…

Slowly, the person begins to walk her away from the clearing. She sees the black duffel bag out of the corner of her eye, and she shouts, trying to squirm out of their grasp to reach it. Something in her seethes with panic over leaving the bag behind, even though she had no idea of its contents, she knows that they are important.

“My bag,” she gasps, trying to reach feebly towards it. “My bag, please, my bag, please please please…!”

“Okay, okay,” the man says in English, rubbing his fingers in comforting circles on her shoulder. “We’ll get it, we’ll get it.”

She watches the child’s mother walk over to the bag and pick it up, struggling with its weight. It’s safe. It won’t be left behind.

The woman closes her eyes, darkness rising to meet her as she loses consciousness.

When she wakes up again, her mind is clearer, and she also finally recalls her name, Ved. Her head’s agonizing throbbing has given way to a dull ache, perhaps because she’s lying on an actual bed. It’s so soft, like laying in a soft downy pillow, and she feels something in her relax. She would’ve just laid there instead of moving, if she didn’t feel blood filling her mouth once again.

She sits up, and grabs a nearby trash can. Ved spits blood into it for a few moments, before looking around the room.

It’s obviously someone’s spare room, probably the family that picked her up earlier. It’s nicely furnished, with large fancy paintings both behind and in front of the bed, hanging on pale blue walls. The paint job is clean, unlike her dorm, where she could see chunks where the grey paint bled onto the ceiling. There’s a nightstand to her right, and on top of it are some generic saltine crackers and a bottle of water.

She swipes both of them quickly, getting to her feet. Her head still feels heavy in an odd way, but she’s confident that she won’t collapse onto the hardwood floor. There’s a window to the right of the bed, and the woman walks over to it, peering out of it as she swishes water in her cheeks.

The first thing she thinks is that the skyline is extremely flat. It’s mostly older, rustic buildings as far as the eye can see, things that she would expect in her part of the city. But when she cranes her neck and peers out into the distance, she can’t find the distinctive twin skyscrapers of One and Two Liberty Towers.

That’s impossible, she thinks, I should at least be able to see them in the distance. And even if this place is built behind it, well, if this is in Rittenhouse I should be able to see the Comcast towers. But they’re not there, everything is flat and scenic. It would be beautiful in another scenario if she’d expected it.

Where am I?

She walks over, spits into the trash can again, before opening the saltines and devouring them. Something brushes against Ved’s leg as she walks, and she looks down at her ankle at some sort of brush-thing resting against it. She grips it, not hard, but feels an odd tingling at her spine as if she had pulled at her arm or something…

Wait, what?

Ved twists her body, trying to get a better view. What she could make out was the brush was connected to a long, scaly tube that poked out from the base of her jeans. Tracing it with a hand, it stops at the base of her spine, fully connected to it. A tail. She had a fucking tail.

She sits on the bed and takes deep breaths. Okay, she thinks, don’t panic. Don’t freak out, Ved. You woke up in a park, in a city you have no recollection of, with a tail. What could I do next instead of dry-heaving again?

Her hands quickly pat down the rest of her body, looking for irregularities. Everything else feels normal, looks normal on inspection, until she reaches her head. As her hands travel up her scalp, they run into something smooth to the touch and solid. She wraps her hands around the circumference of it, and feels an odd sensation, as if she was touching her fingernails. She gradually moves her hands up, shivering at the feeling, before there’s a knock at the door.

“You can come in,” she says, her voice sounding raspy.

The door opens in front of her, very slowly. The man from earlier is in the doorway, with one long white hand balancing on the frame. He was rather tall, wearing a white t-shirt tucked into black jeans, with curly dark hair barely past his ears, and a long face. More than anything he looks like a teenager in an adult's body, gangly and awkward, hovering in the doorframe.

“Oh,” he says, his dark eyes wide. “You’re awake.”

“Yeah, I am,” she says, running a hand down her face. “More or less. I still feel pretty bad though.”

He walks to the bed quickly, and hands her two pills, both red. She downs them in one quick motion and nods in thanks while gulping down water.

The two of them sit in an awkward, rather painful silence. The woman runs a hand down her face, rubbing her eyes with her thumb and index fingers.

“So,” he asks finally, “What happened back there?”

“I have no clue,” she responds, before clearing her throat. “All I remember is going to bed after my Zoom class, and then waking up in Rittenhouse I guess, with blood in my mouth and a searing headache. Really starting to wonder if I got attacked while sleepwalking.”

“Also,” she continues, cutting the man off. “I have no clue what's going on here.” She gestures to her head and to her tail.

“That’s uh, not normally there. I don’t know how that happened either.”

“I’m a little lost,” he says, looking befuddled. “What do you mean by ‘Rittenhouse’?”

“Hm? Isn’t that the park I woke up in?”

“No, no it’s not,” he said, the confusion morphing into concern, and he grabs her arm gently. “We found you in the Jardin du Luxembourg, in the 6th androssiment.”

That can’t be right, she thinks to herself. Rittenhouse isn’t close to her dorms, but it’s more feasible than this.

“Where do you think you are right now?” The man asks, looking at her sternly.

“Philadelphia,” she responds without thought.

He stares at her in shock, his mouth hanging open. He stammers for a few moments, before finally gathering his words together.

“I-I don’t know how or why, but you’re not in Philadelphia. You’re in Paris. France.”

“What?” The woman hisses, her eyes going wide. “No, no, no, no. That’s not possible. I don’t bring my passport along with me anymore. How could I even get on a plane to go there?”

She pulls the bag from underneath the bed, and shuffles through it. There’s her switch, her laptop, her phone, her screen tablet, charging cords, pencils, pens, headphones. The woman sifts through it, looking for any sort of passport or plane tickets, but only finds her driver's license. Grabbing it, she examines it closely, before turning it towards the man.

“Seek, look! This is the only ID I have right now!” She exclaims. “There’s no way I could’ve traveled with just this…”

The man stares at it for a few moments, brow furrowing, before he starts laughing loudly.

“Why are you laughing? I’m serious!”

“Look,” he snickers, pointing to the date. “It says you were born May 2nd 2000.”

“And?”

“Well, that would mean you wouldn’t have a driver’s license. You’d be five years old.”

“Huh?” She stares incredulously at him. “What do you mean? I’m Lisette Card. That’s my birthday, right there. I’m turning twenty-one in two months.”

The man looks at her like she had grown two heads, which to be honest, with how her day is going right now? That wouldn’t be the weirdest thing that’s happened to her.

“What year is it for you?” He asks, his face pale. “Right now?”

“It’s 2021,” she says firmly.

“No, that’s not right,” he says, a nervous smile on his face. “It’s 2006.”

Ved’s blood runs ice cold, so much so that she’s surprised she hasn’t frozen on the spot. There’s no way. There’s no way any of this is true. There’s no way any of this is real. She tries to speak, to deny this, but the words catch in her throat.

The man stares at her silently, his expression changing into one of pity.

“This must be a lot to take in,” he says softly, and Ved nods.

At this point, any hysterical emotion is dulling, and all she feels is an overwhelming yet quiet horror. Part of her expected hysteria, everyone in the movies gets hysterical when things like this happen. But, perhaps it was the marathon of events, how they seemed to be revealed one after the other, that causes this.

“I’m honestly surprised you believe me,” she says, her voice monotone.

“Well,” he says, scratching at the back of his head. “We, uh, looked through your bag while you were out... I hope you don’t mind, but we were… worried. My wife thought you were like, some sort of tech engineer, but I had this odd feeling about it, you know?”

Ved laughs softly, looking over at her bag. Between the screen and keyboard of her laptop, she can see a square slip of white paper sticking out. Gingerly, she opens it, pulls the paper out and unfolds it.

It’s in Korean, which thankfully is a language she knows, and it reads:

You are 304 and you will

The author's handwriting is choppy, and whatever they wrote next is smudged beyond recognition. Just her fucking luck.

“What does it say?” The man asks, peeking over her shoulder, before turning to her. “Can you read that?”

Ved translates what was written for him, and he nods.

“Does that mean anything to you?”

“Nope,” Ved says, putting it back in the bag. “No meaning to me at all.”

The first day of this new life and she already wants a break. Wants to go home, back to Philly in her own time, where she knows everyone even though the world is in a terrible predicament. If she was able to think rationally, she would maybe pontificate on how selfish she’s being. But everything in her mind seems to exist within a haze, unable to be grasped fully.

She sighs and rubs her fingers into her temples.

“Lisette-”

“Ved,” she says, and the man blinks at her quickly. “That’s what everyone calls me.”

“Ved, how about we get you something to eat, hm? You look like you’re going to keel over from starvation.”

She nods and smiles weakly.

“That sounds very nice. Thank you, Mr…”

“Just Hugo is fine,” he says with a smile and helps her to her feet. “That’s what everyone calls me.”

“Heh,” Ved says weakly, looking off to the side.

Before she turns away, out of the corner of her eye, she swears she sees a figure hovering in the window. They are barely visible, more like a black shadow, but Ved can make out their mouth. They are speaking something, but the words are inaudible. All she can do is watch their lips, and try to read them.

She blinks, and then they are gone. As if they were never there.

Fuck me, dude, she thinks as Hugo leads her away, can I go three minutes without something weird happening to me?


End file.
